Tag: refugees

Global Outcry

By Amal El-Sayed

 

A wave of blue and yellow—
A sea of sky and grain
Washed all over the world.
Braving snowstorms and epidemics,
You marched in the name of peace.

A row of strollers lying in wait
In Poland, in Slovakia.
Supplies, donations, support.
Homes—opening
Families—welcoming
The whole world—enclosing Ukraine with love.
So much love.

I applaud you for your humanity—
But I ask you:

Did you offer that same warm welcome to Syrian children
Who are slowly being chewed by hunger in patched tents?
Did you embrace the Syrian mothers with the same solidarity
Or did you leave them to freeze to death in bone-chilling camps?

Where were you when Iraqi women
Struggled to escape the blows and kicks and slaps
Of domestic abuse?
Or did their abayas make them not civilized enough for you?

Where were you when Afghan women
Cried hopelessly for help under the rule of terrorists?
Or did their burqas make them subhuman?

And pray tell—where were you when Mexican children
Were turned away at your borders?
Left to the gangs, the traffickers, the cartels!
Or did the color of their skin make them lesser?

Where was your outcry when Palestinians were
Displaced, tortured, executed, massacred—
Their blood fertilizing the land, their screams echoing through the sky.
Yet still, you turned them away.
Where was your welcome, your sympathy, your so-called humanity?

And did you forget the refugees from
Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Dominica, Haiti
Who walked through deserts and crossed perilous oceans
To reach YOU.
But all you did was turn your cheek and say:
Illegal, Criminal, Other.

 

Amal El-Sayed has an MA in English literature and is currently working on her PhD in English poetry. She is an assistant lecturer at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Pacific and Spillwords. Her short story “Unmask Me” is to be published by Wyldblood Press in October 2023.

Image credit: “Refugees in Despair” by Ani Bashar via a Creative Commons license.

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Refugees Displaced in Foil

By Uzomah Ugwu

The guards did not even give us numbers
or sound the vowels in our broken names
that were whole before we arrived
at this destination
that keeps us moving in grief.

She asked what I wanted to eat
like we weren’t going to die here
at any minute, any hour,
borrowed moments we could,
would, not be given back.

She asked with a burnt punctuation
I was forced to feed on for a while ’til
I forged an answer off my dry and unused throat.
Words I cannot remember at all
95 degrees, it did not matter

She grabbed my hand and placed it on my belly,
like she was giving me direction to another life,
and smiled. I wanted to beg her
to take her happiness away
for this was not the place,
here where we laid wrapped in aluminum,
where they baked off our rights as they chose.

We did not give up our freedoms
to feel this consumed.

Her eyes yielded to the floor
for we all were crossing over the border
in hopes of so much more.

Such a high risk for a life
we thought was a myth.
Was it worth it to be sitting here,
like a chicken on a stick
they do not even turn over—do or won’t?

Before I could listen to my grief any longer
she stopped me, looked at me
leaving thorns in my eyes as she said,

“You are always going to be them.”
If you don’t think you have worth in this life,
if you don’t, they will eat you alive.
She took my hand and gave me an orange and smiled,
gazing at the foil that covered us,
smothered refugees

 

Uzomah Ugwu is a poet-writer and activist.

Photo credit: Mitchell Hainfield via a Creative Commons license.